Preparing to be warm...

Work continues under the house to get more of the floor insulated before it gets too cold outside. It is working pretty well to have me outside cutting the insulation and then sending it into Neil to install. We worked on it for almost two hours until Neil's knees couldn't take much more.

Before Neil crawled out from under the house he took a bit longer and installed the whole house water filter onto the water line. It will be nice to be able to drink water right from the tap finally. We give our Bria water pitcher a real work out around here!

Neil was going to start construction on the hay feeder for the alpacas this afternoon but when we uncovered his table saw the table was completly rusted. Some steel-wool and WD-40 got the worst of it off but by that time it was getting dim and we needed to get cleaned up for a road trip to see about a wood stove that Neil saw in a store in Greensboro, NC yesterday. It was marked as $198.oo. Neil called this morning to confirm the price and to see if they had them in stock before we drove the hour and a half down to get it. We were assured that everything was fine.

We left the house about 4:30pm and arrived just after 6pm to look at the stove. It was excextly what we wanted for our living room. It was a small stove so it would fit snugly into our current fireplace opening, it had a good EPA rating, took 18" logs, had a 6" top mounted smoke pipe and had a glass front so we could enjoy the fire... and it was within our budget! Neil found a clerk and asked to have one brought up to the front so we could buy it. The clerk looked at the SKU# on the tag and said "Oh, this is the wrong tag. Let me go look up the right SKU# for this." Right away Neil and I knew it wasn't going to be good. He came back and said that this stove was a special order stove and it would take 2-3 weeks to get one here... and it was actually $699! What?!

Neil asked to see the manager. When the manager got there Neil told him that he had specifically called earlier to confirm the price of this stove, as the price did seem "to good to be true" to us, and that when told it was right and that there were plenty in stock that we drove 3 hours round trip to come get it. The manager was great! He apoligized for their mistake and said that if we wanted to take the floor model (that had some minor scratches on the glass door) that he could offer it to us for $450. Neil and I discussed it and as it truly was the perfect stove for us and other comp models we had researched were well over $1000 we opted to dig deep into the budget and get it anyway. So, while the stock guys where loading it up for us I milled around the store a bit. I found a great little solar shed light for the goat barn for $40 and the kids picked up a little toy a piece. When we were at the register paying for our items the manager said, "I am going to give you an additional %20 off the full retail value on the stove and your other item as well. Oh, and the toys are on the house too!" WOW! Now this was a manager that respected that his staff messed up and wanted to make it right for us! So, that $699 stove ended up costing us less then $350!

This is a photo from the manufacturer's web site. Interestingly, the stove is listed on their site at $899.50!

There were seven eggs this morning!